[WikiEN-l] Foundation audit

[Anthony]

On Feb 11, 2008 6:20 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/02/2008, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> > The whole point of the financial statements is to clearly present the
> > facts.
>
> To people with a decent amount of financial knowledge, yes. To an
> accountant, it probably makes perfect sense to group certain things
> together, and that's why they do it. It clearly makes no sense to me,
> you or Ant, but we're not really the intended audience - that's why
> people employ accountants and brokers in order to deal with the
> details that they don't have the training to understand.
>
To quote Wikipedia, <quote>Financial statements are intended to be
understandable by readers who have "a reasonable knowledge of business
and economic activities and accounting and who are willing to study
the information diligently."</quote>  And the statements do make sense
at least to me - though they may or may not be misleading depending on
the facts which I am not privy to.  Again, I never said the statements
are misleading, Ant did.  And I fully agree with one thing Ray said:
"Since an audit was involved, any misleading statements should have
been commented by the auditors."  In fact, I think that statement is
quite analogous to my original one that "You shouldn't ever vote to
approve financial statements that you know to be misleading."  For the
logically impaired, neither Ray nor I are saying that the statements
*are* misleading, our statements are hypothetical ones.

Who produced the financial statements?
When were they completed?
When did the board members get access to them?
Why were they approved after the audit, and not before?